How do I rotate my display when not using an X Server?

Solution 1:

You can rotate your virtual framebuffers using fbcon. 0 through 3 to represent the various rotations:

• 0 - Normal rotation
• 1 - Rotate clockwise
• 2 - Rotate upside down
• 3 - Rotate counter-clockwise

These can be set from the command line by putting a value into the correct system file. Rotate the current framebuffer:

echo 1 | sudo tee /sys/class/graphics/fbcon/rotate

Rotate all virtual framebuffers:

echo 1 | sudo tee /sys/class/graphics/fbcon/rotate_all

If you want this to happen automatically when you start your system, you need to modify your boot loader configuration to give it the correct options. In /etc/default/grub add fbcon=rotate:1 to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX line:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="fbcon=rotate:1"

(Don't forget to run sudo update-grub after changing this file.)

Sources: Rotate Screen, not running X windows, Rotate console on startup (Debian)